The Secret of Drawing episode 2
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00:00🎵
00:30🎵
00:37Human beings need stories, myths, tales, legends.
00:41And history shows that the drawing has played just as crucial a part
00:45in satisfying that basic need as the word.
00:49🎵
00:53But there's a big difference between what happens when you tell a story
00:57and what happens when you draw it.
00:59And I think the great French artist Henri Matisse put his finger on it
01:03when he said that whereas the writer has to use the shared language of speech,
01:09every artist uses his own self-invented visual language.
01:14So every element of every story that he draws out
01:18is shot through with his own personality and idiosyncrasies.
01:23🎵
01:26In this programme, I'll be looking at some of the true masterpieces
01:29of narrative graphic art from past and present, east and west.
01:34But I'll also be trying to build a kind of psychological profile
01:38of the storytelling artist to find out what makes them really tick.
01:42🎵
01:51Using drawing to tell a story perhaps brings out the darker side.
01:56Or maybe it's simply that the type of characters attracted to the laborious,
02:01intricate, almost monk-like sphere of drawn narrative
02:06tend to be introspective, edgy, loners even.
02:13I'm going to start my journey in America
02:16because it's one of the main homes of the comic book tradition.
02:20And it's also the home of a man whose work makes me cringe...
02:24and laugh out loud.
02:27But he can be hard to track down for an interview
02:30and prefers to let his work speak for itself.
02:36PHONE RINGS
02:41Hello? Yeah, this is Mr Klaus.
02:45Uh, I don't know. It's not the kind of thing I normally want to do, so...
02:50But anyway, thank you for your interest, though. I appreciate it.
02:56PHONE RINGS
02:58Hello? Um, yeah.
03:01I'd kind of appreciate it if you didn't call me so much.
03:06PHONE RINGS
03:09PHONE RINGS
03:12PHONE RINGS
03:15Hello? Now what?
03:18Alright, look, if, um...
03:21If we can do it, like, in an hour, I'll do it.
03:24But really, I have no more time than that.
03:27And you can't, like, you know, put pinholes in my wall.
03:31You can't have a whole bunch of people stomping through the house.
03:34That's it. One hour.
03:37OK, bye.
03:41Daniel Klaus made his reputation
03:43with the hugely successful book Ghost World.
03:46It's the epitome of his strangely expressive drawing style.
03:50Matter-of-fact, pared-down images,
03:53where little gestures and details stand out.
03:56A knowing glance, a bored stare.
03:59If Edward Hopper had written comic books,
04:01they might have looked like this.
04:04And Klaus stands out because of the precision of his drawing
04:08in relation to his subject matter,
04:10the ennui and confusion of 21st-century American life,
04:14seen through the eyes of two cynical teenagers.
04:20Enid and Rebecca are my meal tickets.
04:23They've taken me this far, those two girls.
04:26Enid is very much the kind of girl I knew in art school,
04:30who's a girl who kind of hates everything,
04:33and Rebecca's kind of the enabler,
04:35you know, the sidekick character
04:37that those kind of girls always seem to have.
04:40I used to run into that kind of tandem a lot,
04:43especially in art school.
04:44They really stick together,
04:45and they really need each other kind of desperately,
04:48and they really desperately want to be each other.
04:52To me it just seemed like a natural tandem to write about.
05:04MUSIC PLAYS
05:23Klaus's fluent drawing style
05:25often evokes an innocent, wide-eyed America
05:28of apple pie and ice cream,
05:31a knowing counterpoint to the darkness
05:33of what he really has to say.
05:54Ghost World propelled Klaus to international cult stardom,
05:59but before that, his ongoing strip Eight Ball
06:02had already been the most talked-about
06:04underground comic series of the 90s.
06:09Issue number one was aptly subtitled
06:12An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness,
06:15Despair and Sexual Perversion.
06:21It's a scathingly ironic indictment
06:23of the banal insularity and intolerance
06:26that characterises, or so Klaus dared to suggest,
06:29vast swathes of Middle America.
06:32I'm not surprised that Matt Groening,
06:34creator of The Simpsons,
06:36which has a similar aura of suburban desperation about it,
06:39repeatedly says it's his favourite comic book.
06:45Just that Eight Ball will be read by five of my friends,
06:49and, you know, that will be it,
06:51and at least I'll have copies of a comic I did
06:54when I was 25 years old.
06:56And, of course, you know, that was the thing everybody responded to,
07:00because it was honest and it had something
07:03that other people weren't really saying.
07:05I think it was something everybody was sort of uncomfortable with.
07:10Klaus said of Eight Ball that he wasn't filtering himself at all.
07:14He was very depressed and he drew the angriest,
07:16most obsessive stuff that came into his head.
07:20I got more and more alienated as I got older in my teenage years.
07:24I mean, I think everybody is an alienated teenager.
07:27In a certain way, I wasn't miserable,
07:29because I was really interested in what I was doing.
07:32I was spending hours every day drawing.
07:34It wasn't like I was just sitting at home smoking dope or something.
07:37I wasn't, like, you know, that kind of depressed.
07:40But I did feel very much, you know, out of the culture,
07:44and it got worse and worse as I got older.
07:47But then I think I learned ways to sort of push the anger into,
07:53you know, more into the character and into the, you know,
07:57the way the stories are told.
07:59I think, you know, I get it out of my system in the comics.
08:11This sense of anger is something he traces back to his troubled childhood.
08:15He says,
08:17''Yes, I remember myself as a kid, and I still do feel bitter.''
08:32My brother left me this huge stack of comics.
08:35He was ten years older than me,
08:37and that was my only source of entertainment in my room.
08:42I would always draw these very kind of distorted, weird, ugly faces,
08:47and my mum would always say,
08:49''Why don't you ever make any of your people attractive?''
08:52And I thought, ''Why would I want to do that? What's the fun in that?''
09:02I doubt Clowes would be the artist he is if he'd had a happy childhood.
09:06I think it incubated his talent to spend years pretty much alone
09:10like a permanent teenage thug.
09:13Apart from anything else, it gave him time to develop drawing technique.
09:18And there's no replacement for hours, days, years of practice.
09:24I started just, you know, imitating the superhero things of the day,
09:29and I was really desperately trying to capture that kind of perfect deadline.
09:34And it took me close to 20 years to actually figure out
09:37what the implement that was used to make that line.
09:40I tried ballpoint pens and flare pens and all those different kinds of things,
09:44and I later realized it was a brush.
09:46It's actually a watercolor brush, a very expensive thing,
09:50that is not made for ink at all.
09:53So I tried the brush, and it was like the ugliest thing I've ever seen.
09:57It just came out horrible. I thought, ''This is truly impossible.
10:00This can't be right.''
10:01But, you know, years and years later, I finally got proficient at it.
10:07Klaus gave us an exclusive reading from one of his favorite strips.
10:11And when you hear it in his own voice,
10:13the full sense of existential angst really does come across.
10:19This husband-and-wife detective team are in town
10:22investigating the disappearance of this missing child,
10:25and we see that they're eating at a Chinese restaurant,
10:28and the husband's complaining, you know,
10:30''Why did you tell the guy to meet us here when you know I hate Chinese food?''
10:34And she says, ''Maybe I'd like Chinese food once in a while.''
10:38And he's like, ''Okay, well, live it up.''
10:42They're kind of looking out the window with these blank expressions, you know,
10:46and she says, ''Seems like a cute town.''
10:48And he says, ''Yeah, well, they all do it first.
10:50It's just another s***hole filled with worthless pigs.''
10:56And we see them there meeting with this police officer from this small town
11:00who gives them a copy of this ransom note
11:03that was written by the person who took the child,
11:06and we see them later in the hotel room,
11:10and the husband, Mr. Ames, is very carefully going over the note
11:14while his wife is bored out of her mind laying in bed.
11:17She's not happy in this relationship,
11:19and he's completely oblivious to her problem,
11:22and he's trying to study this note,
11:24and he hears music coming through the wall.
11:26So he says, you know, ''Why does that guy have to have it so loud?''
11:29And starts shouting at the guy through the wall,
11:31and the wife can sort of see that this is the way he works.
11:33He builds up to these big frenzies of anger,
11:36and she's trying to stop it, you know, ''Don't, Joe. Stop it, Joe.''
11:40And then we see that the guy has gone next door and held his gun on this guy.
11:44He's a big-shot private investigator,
11:47and this guy's just some poor schmuck playing his radio too loud in the motel.
11:51By the time he comes back, his wife is gone.
11:54And so we see him down in the hotel bar,
11:57and he says to the bartender, you know, ''Tell me, friend, are you a married man?''
12:00And the guy says, ''No, sir.''
12:02And says, ''It's a lot of trouble, but it sure can be worth it if you find the right girl.''
12:06He's got this sort of self-deluding, sentimental streak,
12:10and hours later, he goes back into the room,
12:13and the wife is asleep, and he apologizes,
12:16and we see that it's this sort of thing that keeps happening.
12:20And he goes over to the window and says,
12:23''This world would be absolutely unbearable without you.''
12:26We sense that she doesn't quite buy this.
12:30That's it.
12:40Dan Clowes's deadpan world is only the tip of the iceberg
12:43when it comes to the American cult comic strip.
12:46And maybe because the so-called funnies have become, in America,
12:50such an important way of saying things that can't otherwise be said,
12:54certainly not in news or TV,
12:57they've acquired the status of genuinely popular works of art.
13:07There's a very distinct strain of darkness
13:10running through the American comic strip.
13:13I think it first burst onto American popular awareness,
13:16and I mean burst because it burst like a boil,
13:20in the work of Robert Crumb,
13:24who, from the 1960s onwards,
13:26created these seething psychedelic fantasies.
13:34He's the comic strip poet of the Beats and the Hippies,
13:37although his poetry is scabrous and sick,
13:40throwing acid in the face of the acid generation.
13:45Art Spiegelman's probably been the main influence
13:49on serious comic book artists today,
13:51although he's more moralist than satirist.
13:54He's best known for his extraordinary retelling
13:57of the Holocaust, called Maus.
14:02Spiegelman perversely used the language of cheery cartoon comedy,
14:06with the Germans as cats and the Jews as mice.
14:10The book gets its power precisely from the mix
14:13of awful subject matter and incongruous,
14:16pathetic little animal figures.
14:18This is the description of a group of Jews
14:21being taken to the death camps.
14:29It's a mark of Spiegelman's wry, sideways ingenuity
14:32that something so innocuously drawn could be so affecting.
14:36Mickey Mouse it certainly isn't.
14:41But even if you turn to the supposedly light and fluffy
14:44American comic strip, epitomised by Peanuts,
14:48created by Charles Schultz, inventor of Snoopy,
14:51you find that it too has got its dark side.
14:54Schultz was a depressive,
14:56and in many of these little scenes, you could sense that.
15:01Those dreams are not the same.
15:04Those dreams I have at night are going to drive me crazy,
15:07says Charlie Brown.
15:09Last night I dreamed that little red-haired girl and I
15:12were eating lunch together.
15:14But she's gone, she's moved away, and I don't know where she lives.
15:17And she doesn't know I even exist.
15:19And I'll never see her again.
15:21And I wish men cried.
15:25Peanuts was published in the comic strip section of the American Papers
15:29every day for 30 years,
15:31a disguised daily dispatch from the front line of American anxiety.
15:36It occurs to me that storytelling through drawing
15:39is something that we find around us day after day,
15:42precisely because it is something that we need in our lives,
15:45and not just on the funny pages.
15:49There are a few better outlets for dark cartooning,
15:53for work that challenges the status quo,
15:56than the bloody arena of politics.
15:59And an acknowledged master of the form is someone who draws
16:02with a line that's funny, but also has a sharp cutting edge,
16:06satirical cartoonist Martin Rousen.
16:09All of humour, particularly in cartoons,
16:12is about us coping with the awfulness of life.
16:15Now, particularly in terms of satirical cartoons,
16:18that's coping with the awfulness of politics
16:20and the fact we've abrogated responsibilities for our lives
16:23to this bunch of deadbeat, power-hungry maniacs who rule us.
16:27Life's a bitch.
16:29Life's a bitch.
16:31Life's a bitch.
16:33Life's a bitch.
16:35Life's a bitch.
16:37Life's a bitch.
16:39We all die at the end of it, but if you can have a laugh along the way,
16:42it actually makes it bearable.
16:49Because drawing's so spontaneous and direct,
16:52it's the perfect medium for Martin's blunt message.
17:00We read images in an entirely different way
17:04to the way we read text.
17:06Ultimately, the most effective, quickest, sharpest instrument
17:11for getting a political point across
17:14is using a cartoon, because it will be seen quickly,
17:18it should be understood immediately,
17:20it will not delay the reader before they come to the conclusion
17:24the satirist wants them to come to the conclusion of,
17:27which is that their political leaders are imbeciles,
17:30fools, laggards or buffoons.
17:37The artists that have had the greatest influence on Rowson
17:41are the British master satirists,
17:43William Hogarth...
17:47..and James Gilray.
17:49In my opinion, William Hogarth is the grandfather
17:52of the modern political cartoon.
17:55What's interesting about Hogarth is that, in a way,
17:59he has defined our perception of the 18th century.
18:03And if you take Gin Lane, which is possibly the most famous image,
18:07we see it now as a darkly but still inherently humorous image.
18:12This is the equivalent of a tabloid headline
18:16to sell to the urban poor to discourage them from drinking gin,
18:21which was a terrible blight.
18:23It was the crack cocaine of its time, or the ecstasy of its time.
18:26So there's the piece of grim slapstick
18:29of the woman dropping her baby because she's so drunk.
18:32There's the carpenter selling off the tools of his trade
18:35so he can buy gin.
18:36It's of people being drunk
18:38and getting up to various inherently humorous things.
18:41Hogarth almost can't help putting in those elements of humour,
18:46but it is central to the idea of what we now call the cartoon.
18:52Hogarth's humour could be black indeed,
18:54and in this famous image from the four stages of cruelty,
18:58he exists getting his last comeuppance,
19:01his dead body publicly eviscerated.
19:04Hogarth peered into every corner of life and death.
19:17If Hogarth was the grandfather of the modern political cartoon,
19:21Gilray was definitely the father.
19:24And, in fact, you could say quite reasonably
19:27that he cemented in the template for what a political cartoon should be,
19:32and it hasn't evolved one jot since then.
19:39The perfect example of this is The Plum Pudding In Danger,
19:42which is certainly Gilray's best-known image
19:46and probably the most famous political cartoon of all time.
19:49It was produced in 1805 and has not been bettered.
19:54And it's immediately obvious what it's about.
19:57The plum pudding is a metaphor for the world.
20:00The world is being carved up in spheres of influence
20:03between Napoleon on one side and Pitt on the other side.
20:10And it's not for nothing that this cartoon has been stolen
20:14over and over and over again by cartoonists ever since.
20:20And the thieves include Rowson himself.
20:25MUSIC PLAYS
20:46I bumped into Gordon Brown at a party just before the 1997 election
20:51and I was a bit pissed by this stage.
20:53He said,
20:54''Why do you always draw me so fat?''
20:57To which I replied, ''Because you are f***ing fat, Gordon.''
21:00He then made his excuses and left.
21:06I like drawing Blair. It's the eyes, the teeth and the ears.
21:09But also, he's got that f***ing teeth in green,
21:12which is meant to make us love him.
21:14And you can use his teeth as a magnificent political metaphor.
21:19Now I've started drawing him with most of his teeth kicked out.
21:22I've done three cartoons since the election and all of them,
21:25he has very few teeth left.
21:35We understand the late 18th century and the early Regency
21:41through the images of Gilray.
21:43But it's not just the heritage, it's not just the legacy of images.
21:47It's also the subversive frame of mind.
21:50Even when he was actually producing patriotic stuff,
21:53there was always that little germ of subversion in there.
22:04I'm glad Martin's such a Gilray fan because I am too.
22:08And if Gilray hadn't worked in the supposedly ephemeral medium
22:12of the political cartoon, I think he'd be recognised for what he is,
22:16not just a great satirist,
22:18but one of the most brilliant draftsmen in history.
22:26Great artists recognise each other,
22:28and the Spanish artist Goya's own oblique fantasies
22:32were much influenced by Gilray's work.
22:36But Goya took the political print to places even darker,
22:40in a group of 85 etchings,
22:42collectively known as the Disasters of War.
22:47Goya made them to record the atrocities that took place across Spain
22:51following the Napoleonic invasion of 1808.
22:56For me, if one image stands for the bleakness of the entire series,
23:01it's this one, entitled And There's No Help For It.
23:07On a dark and featureless plain,
23:09Spanish guerrillas are being executed by French firing squads.
23:13Martyrs tied to posts, having their brains and hearts blown out.
23:17It could be a scene from anywhere and any when.
23:20Goya's way of saying, there's no end to man's evil.
23:27Disasters of War was a work too politically inflammatory
23:30to be published in the artist's own lifetime,
23:33but that hasn't stopped its influence continuing across the centuries.
23:38Most notably, perhaps,
23:40into the work of that other Spanish giant of art, Pablo Picasso.
23:49In the 1930s, Picasso's target was General Franco,
23:53whom he satirised in these etchings, The Dream and Lie of Franco.
24:00He envisaged the dictator as a kind of disgusting cross
24:04between a penis and a turd,
24:06engaged in acts of senseless violence.
24:19But Picasso was spurred to an entirely new level of outrage
24:22when the village of Guernica was bombed flat by Franco's troops
24:26during the Spanish Civil War.
24:28The artist responded with Guernica.
24:30It's done with a brush in oil paint,
24:32but it's really a huge drawing in the Goya-Gilray tradition,
24:36a great monochrome scream of pain.
24:40It's probably still the single most famous work of art
24:43of the 20th century.
24:45Guernica shows the horror of human violence,
24:48writ large in black and white,
24:50like a vast panel from a cubist war comic.
24:54Throughout its history,
24:55the comic form has been no stranger to explosive violence,
24:59and in the East, in Japan,
25:01this tradition has spawned an enormous industry of imagery
25:05in the popular art form known as manga.
25:10Over two billion manga comics are sold in Japan every year.
25:15The comics are cheap enough to buy one every day,
25:18and they cater for nearly every taste and every age group.
25:23I went to speak to David Wertheim of the Japanese Gallery in London
25:28to find out more about manga and its origins.
25:34I've been to Japan, and there's this strange kind of tension.
25:39If you're on a tube train, for example,
25:41and you see these people, and they're terribly, terribly controlled
25:44and self-contained, and yet you look over their shoulders
25:47and you see what they're reading, these sort of manga books,
25:50just full of blood and violence.
25:52Great.
25:53How does that work? What's going on there?
25:55It is quite bizarre.
25:56I mean, I remember as a child when I lived in Japan,
25:59there was a manga that I used to watch on television and read.
26:03I came over here and saw it in one of the stores, Certificate 18,
26:08and I was only eight when I used to watch this.
26:10And it is very, very aggressive, a lot of killing, a lot of bloodshed,
26:14very dynamic, very strong,
26:17but it just enables people to have an outlet by reading through
26:20and going into their own little world within their sort of repressed state.
26:25Maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but that really is, I think...
26:28You know more than I do.
26:29I think there is definitely an element of that.
26:31But I think there's a popular misconception about manga.
26:34Many people believe that manga only really gets going
26:38after the Second World War,
26:40under the influence of American comic strips.
26:43So it goes as far back as the 12th century.
26:46A monk often referred to as Toba Sojo,
26:50he did a scroll, a very long scroll, which was a parody on human beings,
26:54animals dressed up in various human clothing, kimonos.
26:58It's very, very comical, and I think that's one of the first examples
27:01where you see illustration telling a story in a comic manner.
27:07When woodblock printing was developed in Japan in the 19th century,
27:11it suddenly meant multiple copies of these visual stories
27:14could be produced for a mass audience.
27:17This technique was quickly taken up by the father of Japanese manga,
27:21Hokusai.
27:23The word manga literally means random sketches.
27:30Artists well-known in the West, such as Hokusai,
27:33did a whole series of volumes called Hokusai Manga.
27:38I'd associated Hokusai much more with the single famous images
27:42like The Great Wave,
27:44but are you saying that he actually also produced manga books?
27:47Yes. We have a few examples here, Hokusai Manga.
27:50These were published in various volumes.
27:53Ah, beautiful.
27:55And they take up various subject matters, some very, very comical.
27:59These are sort of very skinny sumo wrestlers...
28:03Yes. ..engaged in very strange acrobatic activities.
28:06It was said that these were produced for the benefit of his students
28:10to learn how to illustrate various subject matters.
28:13So this is a kind of how-to guide for the manga artists to the future,
28:16so to speak. That's correct, yes.
28:26Can we look at some of your other examples?
28:28Because they look, if anything, even more cartoon-like, if you like.
28:31The focus is not about realism, it's more about telling a story.
28:35I think this is where... That's beautiful.
28:37..manga relates to Japanese prints.
28:40Would you get this shorthand for visual expressions?
28:44They are kind of cartoon expressions. Yes.
28:47We will fight you.
28:49There are sort of set features.
28:51In fact, just to illustrate the very, very similar expressions,
28:55these are kabuki actors from the 19th century.
28:58The way the designs occupy the page in this very striking graphic way,
29:02the way they're cropped, for example,
29:04would pretty much be the language that I associate
29:07with the cartoon or the comic strip.
29:09The dramatic expressions, the backgrounds,
29:12the format is very similar to manga.
29:14David, I'm curious about these little booklets over here.
29:17What are all these?
29:19Yes, these are, I would say, the closest that we have to manga today.
29:25These are illustrated stories.
29:27They're sort of picture novels. That's correct.
29:30These, I think, really are the closest to manga comic books.
29:34And these are 19th-century 1860s. Hmm.
29:39So maybe the whole of the comic book tradition as we know it
29:42is fundamentally formed by Japanese art.
29:45I'm a bit biased, so I might have to agree with that one,
29:48but there are different arguments.
29:50But by looking through the books that we have here,
29:53the 19th-century examples of the illustrations with the text,
29:57the stylistic features of the expressions of the faces,
30:00it really is a development right back from the 12th century.
30:03And looking at Hokusai manga stylistically,
30:06I think there's a clear indication
30:08that there is a development within Japan itself
30:11without the outside influence.
30:18An artist who follows many of the ancient visual and narrative
30:21traditions from which manga has evolved,
30:24but at the same time brings them into the modern world
30:27and gives them her own deeply personal interpretation...
30:32..is Misako Rox.
30:38It's no surprise that Misako,
30:40a budding creator of children's comic books,
30:43chose the manga form to unleash her twin obsessions
30:46with drawing and making up stories.
30:54Like almost every one of her generation growing up in Japan,
30:57she lived and breathed manga.
30:59It was as ubiquitous in her culture as soap opera
31:03or fish and chips in Britain.
31:07She now lives in Madison, Wisconsin
31:09and is an avid reader of American comic strips.
31:16But you only have to watch her draw,
31:18right down to her use of a Japanese calligraphic brush,
31:22to see that she is 100% manga.
31:27So, this pen is from Japan.
31:30It's a calligraphy pen.
31:32For drawing, it's really smooth
31:34and I can make thick and thin lines easily.
31:43I never go to art school
31:46and I didn't have the money to buy a nice kind of computer.
31:52I just love drawing just with a hand,
31:55so I just decided to do just everything by my hand.
32:16Misako's naive style was in fact developed
32:19when she was about the same age as many of her readers.
32:25When I was a child, I was really, really shy
32:27because I didn't have friends at that time
32:29and what I did was pretty much drawing or hiding.
32:34When I was hiding, I usually drew on the ground a lot
32:38because I was playing by myself.
32:42Whenever I had time, I was just drawing so hard.
32:47And sometimes, on the weekend,
32:50I just spent the whole day just for drawing.
33:02And that was a strong memory,
33:04and I'm pretty sure when I was eight,
33:06and I just decided, I want to draw manga.
33:08I just want to make such my fantasy world on the paper.
33:12And if I can publish, that would be really awesome.
33:17All of us are born with the ability and desire to draw.
33:20Show me a five-year-old child who doesn't draw.
33:23But most of us lose that skill in adulthood.
33:29I wonder if cartoonists and satirists
33:31are, in a way, the children who never grow up,
33:34who remain forever, the kids at the back of the class,
33:37full of naughtiness and irreverence.
33:41In Japan, I mean, people my age pretty much grew up with manga.
33:47I pretty much taught myself, but I used that as textbook a lot.
33:53Though her style's thoroughly Japanese,
33:55our reclusive friend, Dan Clowes, has been a big influence.
34:00When I was in New York City, in my friend's house,
34:04I just picked up one book,
34:07and it was Eight Ball.
34:09I just went, what's this?
34:11Like, it's so good.
34:13Like, who did that?
34:15He said, Danny Gold, you don't know?
34:17Like, I never heard of it.
34:19He's really famous.
34:21His humor, just everything is so cynical, and it's so great.
34:27And a journalist asked me what I want to do, you know,
34:31what is my dream, and I just said,
34:34I want to be like Daniel Clowes.
34:40Misako's unusual among Japanese comic strip artists in being a woman,
34:44but she seems to embody the very spirit of manga.
34:47On the one hand, she's introverted, full of the Japanese work ethic,
34:51but she's also got this manic, wild child energy,
34:54which comes out after dark, when she puts away her sketchbook
34:58and jumps on stage in nightclubs.
35:01She's a bit like the main character in her forthcoming book, Biker Girl,
35:05which has just been snapped up by Walt Disney's publishing company.
35:09Biker Girl's a quiet, sweet girl by day,
35:12and a thrill-seeking, boyish bike rider by night.
35:21The strip's almost finished, and Misako gathers her friends
35:24and heads off to the nightclub.
35:27The strip's almost finished, and Misako gave us a sneak preview.
35:31So, this story, Biker Girl, it's about Aki,
35:35and she's going to transform to the super biker lady
35:39and find out who the leader is and who killed Toru, her cousin.
35:45She's the person who can totally fight with a bike gun.
35:49And she went to her old friend, who used to be just a playmate,
35:53but now their relationship started changing in a more romantic way.
35:59And she said, like, Kai, I have something to tell you.
36:03And Kai said, like, what is it?
36:07And Aki said, I decided to join the big bikers this weekend.
36:13And he said, like, do you know what you're doing?
36:16I mean, it's really dangerous.
36:19But Aki said, I know, but this is the only chance.
36:23I have to do this.
36:26Misako takes the age-old tradition of storytelling,
36:29with good pitted against evil and romantic true love winning out in the end,
36:34and brings to it an apparently simple but arresting visual style.
36:38The bike leader, he said, this weekend it's going to be a really big race
36:43because a biker girl, she's going to join.
36:46And he just picked three guys to beat up a biker girl.
36:51And the next day, she said to them, OK, guys, see you after the bike race.
36:56And Kai said, Aki, wait!
36:59And he said, totally tears all over her.
37:03Misako's part of a genuinely extraordinary cultural phenomenon.
37:07There are thousands of manga artists producing millions of drawn pages every year.
37:13It's bound to produce some classics.
37:16Misako's only just starting out, but perhaps, who knows,
37:20she's on her way to creating one.
37:24And we're going to see what's going to happen.
37:27So to be continued.
37:36One of Misako's dreams is to bring her drawn stories to life as an animated movie.
37:41But in fact, drawing's vital to the whole world of cinema.
37:45And you might think the camera is all powerful in the world of movies,
37:48but the truth is that behind nearly every great movie,
37:51there's a long-suffering draftsman.
37:54Watch this scene carefully.
37:58This is J. Todd Anderson, top Hollywood storyboard artist.
38:03He got here by plane, car and drawing.
38:12Because to show me how he works,
38:14he storyboarded his own arrival to be interviewed.
38:24This person's flying an aeroplane, correct?
38:26And you can probably see the image of the person inside the aeroplane, correct?
38:31That's your first shot. Now, what is your next shot?
38:34So let's just shoot through the window.
38:37Well, here he is. He's in here.
38:39So we'll probably cheat this shot.
38:41Brings his watch up.
38:43So I'll make a black arrow, which will imply movement of the person.
38:48That's set up two.
38:50Since the aeroplane lands on the runway straight down the middle,
38:52is our axis line of the camera right down the middle of the runway.
38:56The nose size of the aeroplane, you tell me.
38:58When is it too big?
39:02About that big?
39:03Plane stopped.
39:05This is the secondary action in the guy, and he's coming toward us, right?
39:09That's the end of that set up, right?
39:11And the next set up is...
39:13Here's the car.
39:14And our guy will probably run into frame,
39:19probably from the left-hand side.
39:22And he's going to drive away.
39:24So you want to get low so you can have tires squeal, right?
39:28Screech.
39:32Okay, next set up.
39:33So the car is entering frame, right?
39:35So it's going to pull right dead onto the axis of the lens and stop.
39:39You should stab that camera just a little low at the end of the hallway.
39:43Only a suggestion, okay?
39:45He will be real low and cowboyed into the lens.
39:49That's the right stuff shot that we talked about.
39:51Let's get shot.
39:52New deal, okay?
39:54How will this interview chair sit?
39:57Is that right?
39:59Cool car.
40:04That's it.
40:10Doing the storyboard for a BBC arts documentary is slumming it by J. Todd's standards.
40:16He usually works for big-time movie makers like the Coen brothers.
40:21For every shot in all of their movies, such as Oh Brother Where Art Thou,
40:25there's a drawing behind it by J. Todd Anderson.
40:29The storyboarding process is a practical tool used throughout the film business
40:33that enables films to be made not just creatively, but efficiently.
40:39Joel and Ethan's only parameters are their imagination.
40:44It's my job to get what's inside a director's head onto paper.
40:51It's not my job to create the shots.
40:53It's my job to interpret their language into a visual language.
41:01It's very important that I get as close to the images in their brain onto paper
41:06so that everybody, when they walk on the set, is making the same movie.
41:10They're not all imagining what's going on.
41:13The drawings for a feature film take about six weeks to complete,
41:16but they're not just static images.
41:18They have their own language, a set of codes denoting action and movement.
41:25The black arrow always depicts action by the characters or inanimate things.
41:30Anything that's moving within the frame or in and out of the frame
41:34is usually done with a black arrow.
41:38And that way you know instantly that it's action.
41:42Anything that has a big, thick white arrow is generally camera.
41:48Because it's so easy to see immediately what's going on when you do that.
41:55At the end of the process, what you get is like a comic strip version of the movie
41:59before the shooting even begins.
42:01But there's an analogy with high art too.
42:04When old master paintings are x-rayed, preparatory underdrawings are often revealed.
42:10And I think that's exactly what J. Todd's pictures are for the movies.
42:13Underdrawings for entire films.
42:16The framework that makes the whole composition possible.
42:20Take a scene he worked on from a movie directed by George Clooney.
42:23Although J. Todd's drawings remain hidden,
42:26they're beneath every single celluloid frame.
42:30This is a sequence from one of my favourite projects I worked on.
42:33This was George Clooney's movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
42:38Sorry about your teeth.
42:41This falls in one of my favourites.
42:43George, he had such a vision.
42:48And this is a really cool scene.
42:50This is when Sam, as Chuck Beres, the game show host,
42:54has to go out and make his first kill.
42:57Right after this message.
42:59And they're in this slab-side Lincoln.
43:01They're out there in the middle of Mexico, just driving around.
43:08And Sam is talking to the guy he's going to kill.
43:11The camera goes down.
43:13Just as it goes down, he pulls this gun out.
43:15And it's time for him to kill him.
43:17But he flinches for just a second.
43:19And then a scuffle ensues.
43:21And so he's struggling, he's struggling.
43:23And usually what people do is just show just a small portion of the gun struggle.
43:27They don't show the people struggling.
43:29And then the gun goes off. Bang!
43:31And it shoots the driver.
43:33And the driver falls forward.
43:35And now the car doesn't go very fast, but it just goes really slow.
43:41And Sam brings the gun up.
43:44And he shoots at this guy and misses him and hits the door.
43:47And as the guy tries to get away, Sam shoots him in the ass there.
43:51And he's still not dead yet.
43:53And all these people are coming down the street.
43:55And Sam looks down there.
43:56And he's got to do something, you know,
43:58because they're going to create some sort of distraction.
44:00So he's saying, shut up and die, shut up and die.
44:03And I do believe he shoots him again.
44:05He puts his hand over his mouth.
44:08Shut up and die.
44:12Really great scene.
44:16J. Todd's storyboards are the means to an end.
44:19But there's a whole tradition of drawing for the cinema
44:22where the drawing itself tells the story.
44:24One going back over 100 years.
44:29During the 19th century, a number of artists
44:31had experimented with ways of trying to make a drawing move.
44:36They'd been a bit unsatisfactory, things like flicker books.
44:39It wasn't until the invention of the cinema
44:42at the start of the 20th century
44:44that a whole new world suddenly opened up for the graphic artist.
44:48Now he could make drawings that would tell a story unfolding in time.
44:53And not only that, a story that could be projected to a mass audience.
45:06One of the first really successful animators was the American,
45:10Winsor McKay, who made this film, Gertie the Dinosaur, in 1914.
45:23McKay trained as a comic strip artist.
45:26He worked for a number of American newspapers.
45:28Looking at his style, you can see that what he's really done
45:31is transfer the comic strip format to the screen
45:34with a minimum amount of modification.
45:40It's very sweet, but I think of it still as quite rudimentary work.
45:43This is really the cave-painting version of the cartoon tradition
45:47that's going to lead ultimately to Walt Disney.
45:50Gertie will now show that she isn't afraid of me
45:53and will take me for a ride.
45:55Alley up.
45:58There's really nothing in Gertie the Dinosaur to prepare you
46:02for the seriousness and the darkness of a later piece of work by McKay.
46:10A cartoon in which he tackled the theme
46:13of one of the great disasters of World War I,
46:16the sinking of the Lusitania.
46:27It's a very dark piece of work.
46:29I think it also relates very clearly to Goya's disasters of war.
46:33After all, what is the sinking of the Lusitania
46:36if not a disaster of war?
46:38But the difference is that whereas Goya's series
46:41had to be inspected one image at a time by one person at a time,
46:45McKay could reach a vast audience
46:48with this shocking and rather disturbing piece of work.
46:52Although this is an early animation,
46:54it's extraordinarily sophisticated and almost ghoulishly prescient.
47:03When I look at these figures jumping to their deaths,
47:06I can't help thinking of scenes from 9-11.
47:15The technology of animated film might have come on in late 19th century
47:19but hand-drawn animation is still thriving.
47:22This is me, drawn by our final contributor,
47:25who obviously thinks I'm full of hot air.
47:39Here's a more typical example of animator Sylvain Chomé's art,
47:43his Oscar-nominated film Bellevue.
47:50It's the surreal, quirkily imaginative story
47:53of a grandmother's devotion to her cycling-obsessed grandson.
48:05One of the things I like most about it
48:07is the almost willful archaism of the style.
48:10It's as if Toulouse-Lautrec and Tintin's creator Hergé
48:14had collaborated to make a film.
48:20It takes a single animator working on his own
48:23a whole week to make a drawing move for five seconds.
48:26Even with a large team,
48:28it takes Sylvain Chomé at least two years to produce a film.
48:32Animation really is the ultimate test of a draftsman's dedication.
48:49Aim at kids, because...
48:52And I think that was very much the case with Bellevue Rendez-Vous.
48:55I didn't do a film for kids,
48:58but I did it for the adults or people of my age
49:01who actually remember this emotion when they were kids.
49:13I think it's pretty amazing
49:15that Sylvain's kept his childlike enthusiasm for animation
49:18given the arduousness of the process.
49:46They have to be very gentle. It's a very, very long process.
49:56Light drawings are essential.
49:59And then being able to imagine it,
50:03to create it from imagination and not from reference.
50:06To be able to draw an arm facing you, for example.
50:10You know, to draw an arm like that, it's quite nice.
50:13But to draw an arm which is going like that in 2D,
50:16that is going to be very complicated.
50:18And then make it move at the same time.
50:20It's not the easiest art form.
50:30The next drawing is a bit more refined than the one before.
50:34You actually put the detail, you know, like that, on this one.
50:44I just need to, by flipping it like that,
50:47I check the animation.
50:49And the more experience you have in animation,
50:51the less you go to a computer.
50:53You really go at the end when you want to see the fine details.
51:00If you want to draw correctly something,
51:03you have to not think about what you're drawing.
51:05It's a very bizarre thing,
51:07but if you're thinking of what you're doing,
51:10then you don't draw correctly.
51:12So what you have to do is to actually be in sort of sleep.
51:15It's like the paper is full of lines which are put together,
51:18and just some of these lines are good.
51:21And you have to actually get one of these threads and take it out.
51:25And it's basically like discovering something,
51:29and not inventing.
51:31And it's a very, very nice feeling
51:33when you actually at the end sort of wake up
51:35and see what you've been doing.
51:38I always want to see the results straight away,
51:41even after all these years.
51:43I know it's not possible, but I don't think I'm very patient.
51:47You say stubborn, probably.
51:50I'm very stubborn, but not patient.
51:59By then scanning his drawings into a computer,
52:02Chaumet can check his progress.
52:04In this case, on his forthcoming film, The Illusionist.
52:10The story came from a script by Jacques Tati,
52:13the late great giant of French comedy,
52:16known across the world as Monsieur Hulot.
52:28This is what's called a line test,
52:30when the drawings are placed in order and animated.
52:35Sylvain can then check the movement works
52:37before he starts the process of colouring and background.
52:47When the film's completed in a few years,
52:49it will look more like this.
52:51The illusion complete.
52:53Jacques Tati miraculously brought back to life.
53:04Although Chaumet produces nearly everything he does by hand,
53:08there are some small elements of computer animation,
53:11particularly for machinery like bikes, cars and trucks.
53:20We used the technique of the animation of 3D
53:24for most of the objects which are moving,
53:27from cars to bicycles.
53:35If you give a bicycle to a 2D animator
53:37and you ask that person to draw it,
53:39and when you see how complicated the bicycle is,
53:42and when you see all the spokes and everything,
53:45you actually drive the animator mad.
53:50But what we manage very, very well
53:53is actually to integrate it in a way that we don't see it as 3D.
54:05The pedal crossing is my favourite scene
54:08because emotionally it's been a very surprising scene.
54:15And what was amazing with it
54:17is I put the music on the animatic
54:20and everything was coinciding, absolutely everything.
54:26You have a scene where you have a bicycle
54:30and you have a car,
54:32you have a bicycle,
54:34you have a car,
54:36you have a bicycle,
54:38you have a car,
54:40you have a bicycle,
54:42you have the camera moves,
54:45you have the building of the city,
54:47you have all that is working together.
54:57And the first animation of the waves at the beginning,
54:59and the first time I've heard that with the music,
55:02and I was with the animator,
55:03and we just looked at each other and we had these goosebumps.
55:08And still, every time I see the film in a theatre,
55:10I just got the same impression.
55:14It's pure magic.
55:27At the end of the day, Sylvain is a man who draws,
55:31a man who's in love with the process
55:33of turning the two-dimensional, linear drawing
55:36into a living, almost breathing form.
55:39A piece of Pygmalion magic
55:41that will never, for him,
55:43lose its essential, thrilling mystery.
55:49If you used to draw and you've been drawing all your life
55:52and you can see your drawing moving,
55:53I don't know anybody who likes drawing
55:55who wouldn't like to see his drawings moving.
55:58It's really magical when you see it move.
56:00I mean, I've been in animation for a long time
56:02and I still don't know how it works.
56:06I do understand, you know, the process,
56:08maybe the eyes and everything like that,
56:10and the flicking of the...
56:12But still, I don't understand
56:14how you can make something come alive like that.
56:22The realm of the drawn story
56:24is every bit as rich as that of the written word.
56:27After all, I've been looking at a vastly diverse mix of material,
56:31ranging from the prints of Hogarth and Gilray and Goya
56:35to American cult comic strips,
56:37from 19th-century Japanese woodblocks
56:39to the wild world of manga,
56:41from the origins of animation
56:43to the immensely sophisticated work of Sylvain Chaumet.
56:50But I do think that there's a common thread running through it all,
56:54a certain dark attitude,
56:56a mood of satirical disaffection with the way things are.
56:59And I also think it's very important
57:01that all of these popular draftsmen
57:03have aimed their work,
57:05essentially not at the connoisseur of fine art,
57:07but at the man in the street.
57:11But that's led to a certain snobbish attitude
57:14to the whole field of popular graphic art,
57:16the idea that it's somehow peripheral,
57:19lightweight, ephemeral.
57:21I hope I've shown that the opposite is true
57:24and that, actually, the draftsman who wants to tell a story
57:28with a simple pen or pencil
57:30has also created some of the most moving and enduring works of art.
57:34In this field, as in so many others,
57:37I think drawing has played a central part
57:40in enriching our everyday lives.
57:55If you're inspired by the programme,
57:57find out more at bbc.co.uk
57:59slash secretofdrawing.
58:01And in Life Class on BBC Three now,
58:03artist and author Sarah Simplet
58:05teaches a group of absolute beginners how to draw
58:08with the aim of exhibiting their work
58:10at London's Whitechapel Gallery.